this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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Maybe that's what it was. It doesn't necessarily need to be that going forward, as project putlooks anf goals change with time.
Also editing is quite a lot of more work to support than mere viewing. As all tools and actions need to behave correctly - not jusbt the renderer.
And something proprietary can hadly be a "industry standard". It can be "most common" or a "de facto standard". But all "industry standards" are by definition open as any industry worth its weight doesn't rely on or include a single point of failure anywhere within itself.
"It doesn't necessarily need to be that going forward"
This part does not make any sense. Making GIMP to be able to support any image format is a good thing. Especially for future file preservation.
If it was merely industry standard, if a software already good, people will just use the default format. It already happen with various industries, like comic making in Asia using .CLIP (Clip Studio Paint) instead of .PSD
That's nice to have. For both GIMP and the industry's sake, priorities should be:
GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop. It isn't a psd reader.
Being the format jack of all trades yet master of none isn't too great of an idea. It'll just exacerbate GIMP's main current problem: an ancient UI Photoshop enthusiasts dread. A lot might consider switching if the bad GIMP UX was better than the also-bad Photoshop UX.
If I had to say what my main design gripe with gimp is, that'd be modularity. Seperate the ui (skins) from the tools, effects and rendering (formats). The UI is especially egregious in its hard-codedness while effects are pretty well-supported.
A few more apis would go a long way. Hell, even the closed Photoshop has open(ish) apis, since even Adobe know the value of an ecosystem and not just their internal r&d department!
@unwarlikeExtortion Sure - what additional things would you like accessible via API? Public docs for reference: https://developer.gimp.org/resource/api/
As for separation, the styling of elements is done via separate (GTK3 subset of) CSS so that's fairly flexible. The GUI elements themselves are defined in C, which is less flexible but we do separate them out in source in our /widgets and /gui folders as best we can.